The Hurdle of Bureaucracy

Systems and procedures are put in place to make our lives easier but sometimes too many shortcuts become a labyrinth. Too many safety measures can mean never achieving the task to begin with and too much red tape is a road block.

I found this much to be true working as a youth programs coordination with a big city school district. I wasn't school staff therefore I was not given access to resources teachers and other staff have such as IT request forms, a directory to student and staff emails (aside from the external one on the schools website that was often a void to disappointment) and at the start of the covid-19 pandemic: Google classroom. I like many other partner staff was left behind. The ugly step child in the time of a pandemic. It's understandable that after school clubs and sorts were not the priority during an unprecedented pandemic but I was still expected to perform my job functions without access to the actual kids. The school districts I work with requires a rigorous background check in order to have contact with students in a virtual space and even then communication can never be one to one. This causes major issues when the pandemic struck and all communication moved online. Hundreds of people now had to serve students through a new platform. I was expected to recruit students to virtual after school programs where the facilitators where waiting weeks to months to get background check results and then the secondary second tier screening to be certified to work with students.

Now with the semester almost finished much needed programs like counseling services and other social emotional supports are delayed due to this stern requirements. We are getting in our own way and not providing students much needed supports due to bureaucracy.

Am I suggesting we allow anyone and everyone have access to underaged children without proper precautions or background checks? Absolutely not but when power is centralized with a large school district and individual schools all have to communicate through the same over worked departments it delays progress significantly. More power should be given to individual schools to certify the adults working within their school and find systems that work for them. We are stifling creativity by forcing hundreds of diverse schools with vastly different populations and needs to all comply to the same guidelines.

Almost every time I asked for support or help from the schools administration I was referred to a department within the school district who would never follow up with me or would send me to a different department. I sat around for weeks often waiting for a single response only for them to tell me they were the wrong person to speak to and referring me elsewhere to repeat the same song and dance. I was starting to get dizzy. This experience is not unique to me and also affects school administrators working to find a better approach to discipline, or school attendance but having to stick to district policies that are outdated and punitive. One of our grant's tasks and core values is the implementation of restorative justice. We are expected to change an internal system as outsiders in a school that employs armed police officers to roam the halls of a predominantly Black and Latinx school.

It's past time for large city school districts to read the room and loosen the leash. Schools can greatly benefit from de-centralized leadership that encourages innovation and allows school administrations to act and make changes based on the individual needs of their students. In big city districts where schools vary vastly in size, racial demographics and family income a top down approach is not always the best.